Interference in telecommunication networks is becoming more and more problematic as demand for wireless services continues to grow and allocated frequency bands become compressed. Interference can result in noisy links in analog transmissions, and limited range, dropped calls, or low data rates for digital transmissions. An indicator of interference in digital signals is a high noise floor in a receive channel. Upon identifying and locating a high receive noise floor, a spectrum analyzer can be employed to look for interference on the receive frequencies. Once an interfering signal is detected, the signal can be characterized to possibly identify the source of the interfering signal.
Sources of interference can be internal to a telecommunication network or can be external to the telecommunication network. External sources of interference can include not only signal transmitters, but also sources of impulse noise created whenever a flow of electricity is abruptly started or stopped. Many external, interfering signals cannot be identified using typical techniques and the source of the signal must be located by hunting for the source. However, the variety of different possible sources of interference and the ability of some sources to interfere from great distances, can make locating the source difficult.